From Jekyll to minimalist blog
2019 - WordPress + cPanel
When this site was launched back in 2019, I was using the managed version of Wordpress as my CMS along with cPanel. It was great and suited me well as a beginner, but not for too long.
Having abundant features sounds excellent, but sometimes, it is just unnecessary and daunting. Stuff like a mail server, plugins and themes will increase the complexity of the website and the attack surface.
So after a short while, I jumped to Jekyll, which was hosted using GitHub Pages.
Google indexed my website shortly after the website was published
2020 - Jekyll + GitHub Pages
Jekyll is nice, and I greatly enjoyed using it for a long time thanks to the running cost of GitHub Pages. It’s free for everyone (at least for now) and easy to set up as long as your the is static. All of the website’s assets are served through GitHub’s infrastructure, so basically there’s nothing to worry about in terms of traffic and access speed.
I switched away because I’m looking for a more minimalist kind of website, preferably a small one that looks more like a personal website rather than an academic one.
Okay, so why not just change the theme or maybe the engine itself, say Hugo, for example. I did give some thoughts and considerations on it, and there were several reasons that encouraged the shift:
- I can’t find a theme that suits my needs
- I want full control of my website (e.g. where is it hosted)
- I don’t have much time to learn about Hugo
- I want the RSS to only include posts that I want to include
The old look for the website, when it was using Jekyll
2023 - BearBlog-like platform
In March this year, I discovered the BearBlog blogging platform with exciting headers.
A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform
No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words.
It fulfils almost all of the requirements and I quickly registered to give it a try. This website has a similar outlook and feeling as BearBlog but this blog is not developed using BearBlog. They just share the same minimalist “theme”.
For this website, I opted for another repository, the PolarBearBlog, written in Go. This can be said to be a “semi” self-host solution for BearBlog, where it’s a personal blogging application rather than a platform for multiple users.
I forked my own repository out of it and made it “fully” self-host, but that will be another story on its own. I’ll write about it in the near future.
Finally, the source code for this blog is available at my GitHub.
And I’ll see you again in the next post.